Microsoft plans to cut 3,000 jobs to conquer cloud computing

My last article was already echoing the job cuts at the SoundCloud music streaming platform. Today, it is Microsoft that plans, through its CEO Satya Nadella, to lay off up to 3,000 employees, or approximately 2.5% of the 128,000 employees worldwide. But it is mainly in the United States and in the Marketing and Commercial department that redundancies will take place.

Behind this salary reorganization, a desire and a goal to develop its cloud platform: Azure. Cloud computing is a growth relay for many companies like Amazon and Google. Microsoft has been well diversified since its inception, developing Azure is a way to refocus on these skills that have made its strength. However, this subsidiary is not yet profitable. Hence the advantage of dismissing in certain ancillary services. Notwithstanding the rule, it is the Marketing and Sales department that bear the costs.

But the restructuring plan should go further. In 2014, the CEO announced that it would dismiss 18,000 people from its mobile subsidiary. Then 7,800 the following year and 1,850 last year. In fact, Microsoft has grown from 128,000 employees in 2014 to 114,000 in 2016. The trend is likely to decline further in the coming years. It should be recalled that the company had experienced a strong recruitment between 2013 and 2014, from 99 000 employees to 128 000.